fe. I
will bear your name--or the one by which you must be known. And at the
very end of all, in that hour of triumph when you know that you have
borne me safely over that abyss at the brink of which I am hovering
now, you will go off into the forest, and--"

She approached him, and laid a hand on his arm. "You will not come
back," she finished, so gently that he scarcely heard her words. "You
will die--for me--for all who have known you."

"Good God!" he breathed, and he stared over her head to where the red
and gold billows of the forests seemed to melt away into the skies.

CHAPTER FOUR

Thus they stood for many seconds. Never for an instant did her eyes
leave his face, and Philip looked straight over her head into that
distant radiance of the forest mountains. It was she whose emotions
revealed themselves now. The blood came and went in her cheeks. The
soft lace at her throat rose and fell swiftly. In her eyes and face
there was a thing which she had not dared to reveal to him before--a
prayerful, pleading anxiety that was almost ready to break into tears.

At last she had come to see and believe in the strength and wonder of
this man who had come to her from out of the North, and now he stared
over her head with that strange white look, as if the things she had
said had raised a mountain between them. She could feel the throb of
his arm on which her hand rested. All at once her calm had deserted
her. She had never known a man like this, had never expected to know
one; and in her face there shone the gentle loveliness of a woman whose
soul and not her voice was pleading a great cause. It was pleading for
her self. And then he looked down.

"You want to go--now," she whispered. "I knew that you would."

"Yes, I want to go," he replied, and his two hands took hers, and held
them close to his breast, so that she felt the excited throbbing of his
heart. "I want to go--wherever you go. Perhaps in those years of
centuries ago there lived women like you to fight and die for. I no
longer wonder at men fighting for them as they have sung their stories
in books. I have nothing down in that world which you have called
civilization--nothing except the husks of murdered hopes, ambitions,
and things that were once joys. Here I have you to love, to fight for.
For you cannot tell me that I must not love you, even though I swear to
live up to your laws of chivalry. Unless I loved you as I do there
would not be those